Merritt Clifton's Letter to Langley Middle School Concerning their Support of the Heifer ProjectFrom The Heifer Project: Inhumanity in the Name of Humanity -
An all-creatures.org Animal Issues Article Series

Moo-ving people toward compassionate living

FROM

Wolf has informed us that your classes during the next several weeks have
been assigned to raise funds for Heifer Project International, and that a
portion of his grade will depend on his participation.

Wolf will not be participating in any activity whatsoever to benefit
Heifer Project International, which we view as one of the most ecologically
destructive and economically imperialistic projects ever to ravage the Third
World in the name of "taking up the white man's burden"--a concept which was
very much on the mind of Indiana farmer and evangelical Christian missionary
Dan West when he founded HPI in 1947.

Heifer Project International is still very much an evangelical Christian
sectarian organization, as the accompanying HPI bylaws, taken from the 2002
HPI filing of IRS Form 990, make very clear. It is therefore
constitutionally questionable whether a public school should be encouraging,
let alone coercing students to participate in HPI fundraising regardless of
the other issues at hand.

Beyond that, Heifer Project International, as regards trying to eliminate
world hunger, is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

This is no original insight of mine. Mohandas Gandhi identified rising
per capita meat consumption by the rich and middle classes as a major cause
of starvation by the poor--and warned that even if the poor could afford to
eat meat at the rate of the rich, the earth might not withstand the strain
of producing so much grain to feed livestock. Paul Erlich and Frances Moore
Lappe warned as far back as the 1960s that U.S.-led efforts to promote more
animal husbandry in the underdeveloped world were deeply misguided.

Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute, Jeremy Rifkin of the Foundation
for Economic Trends, Diet For A New America author John Robbins, the late
agricultural reform advocate Henry Geiger of the Manas Institute, the Indian
agricultural reformer Vandana Shiva, and the late Henry Spira, founder of
the Coalition for Nonviolent Food, among many others, have reached similar
conclusions.

In 1997 I personally investigated the impact of animal agriculture on the
poor, with specific reference to the role of Heifer Project International as
one of the most important mechanisms in persuading Third World nations to
adopt a meat-centered diet.

My report, The Meat Mob Muscles In, also accompanies this letter, along
with various articles summarizing the findings of Rifkin, Robbins, Brown, et
al.

Even beyond that report and the other items with it, there are still
further points to make--in particular, about the fallacious image that
Heifer Project International promotes of livestock farming, quite beyond the
fallacy that it is effectively fighting hunger.

Heifer Project International raises funds by appealing to the myth of Old
MacDonald's Farm, where all the animals were supposedly treated kindly,
before they were eaten. Recipients of their literature who may know the
truth of how nearly 10 billion animals per year are raised and killed for
meat in the U.S. (approximately a third of the total global slaughter) are
encouraged to believe that Old MacDonald's Farm may still exist somewhere
abroad.

If Old Macdonald's Farm still exists anywhere, we have not seen it, in
visits to rural regions of every continent. But then, it never did--not as
city-dwellers imagine it.

I know the actuality of Old Macdonald's Farm because I lived on such a
farm for many years in rural Quebec. I shoveled manure by hand, helped to
feed cows, chickens, ducks, sheep, and hogs, chopped firewood with an ax,
baled hay, and drank warm milk straight from the milking bucket -- and I saw
what really went on there, and on all the neighbors' farms in that then very
remote rural community, where many of the old-timers had never traveled more
than 50 miles from their birthplace, some still ploughed with horses, and a
considerable number were illiterate.

Old MacDonald drowned kittens, shot dogs, chopped the heads off chickens,
slashed pigs' throats, flogged his horses when in a bad mood -- and tacked
coyotes' bullet-riddled hides to the barn door, below the deer skulls.

Inheriting the remnants of this barnyard paradise, Old Mac's sons built
pig or chicken factories under contract to conglomerates, or pushed calves
into veal crates.

(I stopped drinking milk in 1982 when my stomach rebelled after hearing
cows bawl for their calves, as the calves bawled back from the truck taking
them away.)

Old Mac probably didn't intend to be as mean as he was -- at least not
all of the time -- but he really didn't want to "know better," and like a
lot of other people in traditional cultures, he resisted any effort to
persuade him to change his ways.

Old MacDonald's wife was just as hardened to animal suffering. One of
Kim's most traumatic early memories was of visiting her grandparents in
Tennessee and seeing her grandmother wring the neck off a chicken to fry for
Sunday dinner -- a meal Kim couldn't stomach.

The sentimentally remembered earth-wisdom of bygone people and times,
which Kim and I both saw first-hand, is in truth just a projection of
disenchantment with here-and-now. Painfully aware of current atrocities
against animals, we wish there was a time when kindness prevailed -- a wish
as old as the Hebrew story of the Garden of Eden.

Heifer Project International speaks to that wish, while preparing the
Third World to accept the advent of the pig and chicken factories that
inevitably follow the adoption of greater economic reliance on animal
husbandry.

In truth, agriculture in any form that includes killing animals was never
kind.

On Old MacDonald's farm, the process of denial began with encouraging
children to hunt and trap, and to bond with animals raised as 4-H
projects--animals whom the children were later forced to tearfully sell for
slaughter.

That still goes on right here on Whidbey Island, right next door to the
Langley Middle School at the county fairgrounds, and should be recognized by
now as a form of psychological child abuse.

Elsewhere, the initiation rite is roughing up animals in amateur rodeos.
Sometimes that is combined with raising a 4-H animal. Once the child no
longer considers animals' pain, he or she is ready to become a livestock
farmer.

Desensitizing methods vary from place to place. Within the Third World
they include public rites such as animal sacrifice, still practiced in parts
of Africa, India, and elsewhere, bullfighting in Spain, France, and Latin
America, and beating, burning, or boiling dogs and cats to death in Korea
before eating them, to name just a few of the atrocities we are familiar
with.

Around the world, societies that practice animal husbandry are
desensitized societies. The abuse of animals inevitably spills over into the
treatment of women and children. Polygamy, forced marriage, female genital
mutilation, and slavery persist in in many of the very regions that Heifer
Project International serves, for example, as extensions of common
agricultural practice to those of our own species who are least able to
protect themselves.

So what can we do to stop the cruelty where it begins, feed the hungry,
and create a happier, healthier, more just world?

I contemplated that question a lot on cold Quebec winter evenings beneath
the northern lights, which hinted at miracles but gave no answers. Years
would pass before I met Kim and Wolf was born. Together we found our answer,
in publishing ANIMAL PEOPLE, creating a global community of people who care
about animals and stand up, even in the most difficult and inhospitable
places, to oppose all cruelty.

Wolf has been part of our nonprofit work his entire life. Apart from his
very valuable contributions as our illustrator, he has contributed art to
many other nonprofit projects, including Spay/USA, the International
Companion Animal Welfare Conference, the McKee Project in Costa Rica, the
Primarily Primates sanctuary, and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

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